Proposal: Add log1p and expm1 to GHC.Float.Floating

[John Lato]

No, but due to the open nature of type classes I don't think a lack of
specific instances should hinder good engineering principles.  And it would
be much simpler to find them if they crash when people try to use them
instead of failing silently.

Anyway, I think my position is pretty clear by now.  If the majority thinks
incorrect behavior is better than bottoming out I won't say any more
against it.


On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 9:46 PM, Gershom Bazerman <gershomb at gmail.com>wrote:

>  Let me try to be a bit concrete here.
>
> Are there _any_ implementations of Floating outside of base that we know
> of, which we are _concretely_ worried will not implement log1p and thus
> cause algos to lose precision? If anybody knows of these implementations,
> let them speak!
>
> Furthermore, if we do know of them, then can't we submit patch requests
> for them? Unless there are too many of course, but I know of only one type
> of "typical" implementation of Floating outside of base. That
> implementation is constructive, arbitrary-precision, reals, and in that
> case, the default implementation should be fine.
>
> (Outside of that, I know of two other perhaps implementations outside of
> base, one by edwardk, and he as well as the other author are fine adding
> log1p).
>
> Also, in general, I don't care what happens to Floating, because it is a
> silly class with a hodgepodge of methods anyway (plenty of which
> potentially apply to things that aren't 'floating point' in any meaningful
> sense), although RealFloat is even sillier. (By the way did you know that
> RealFloat has a defaulted "atan2" method? Whatever we do, it won't be worse
> than that).
>
> Anyway, +1 for the original proposal, and also +1 for adding this to
> RealFloat instead if that's acceptable, because I'm sure everyone could
> agree that class couldn't possibly get much worse, and there's precedent
> there anyway.
>
> Also, I should add, as a rule, I think it is near-impossible to write
> numerical code where you genuinely care both about performance and accuracy
> in such a way as to be actually generic over the concrete representations
> involved.
>
> Cheers,
> Gershom
>
>
> On 4/23/14, 7:57 PM, John Lato wrote:
>
> There's one part of this alternative proposal I don't understand:
>
> On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 5:04 AM, Edward Kmett <ekmett at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>  * If you can compile sans warnings you have nothing to fear. If you do
>> get warnings, you can know precisely what types will have degraded back to
>> the old precision at *compile* time, not runtime.
>>
>
>  I don't understand the mechanism by which this happens (maybe I'm
> misunderstanding the MINIMAL pragma?).  If a module has e.g.
>
>  > import DodgyFloat (DodgyFloat) -- defined in a 3rd-party package,
> doesn't implement log1p etc.
> >
> > x = log1p 1e-10 :: DodgyFloat
>
>  I don't understand why this would generate a warning (i.e. I don't
> believe it will generate a warning).  So the user is in the same situation
> as with the original proposal.
>
>  John L.
>
>
>>  On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 5:24 AM, Aleksey Khudyakov <
>> alexey.skladnoy at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>  On 21 April 2014 09:38, John Lato <jwlato at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > I was just wondering, why not simply numerically robust algorithms as
>>> > defaults for these functions?  No crashes, no errors, no loss of
>>> precision,
>>> > everything would just work.  They aren't particularly complicated, so
>>> the
>>> > performance should even be reasonable.
>>> >
>>>  I think it's best option. log1p and exp1m come with guarantees
>>> about precision. log(1+p) default makes it impossible to depend in such
>>> guarantees. They will silenly give wrong answer
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
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